The present disclosure relates generally to social networking systems and more specifically to linking financial accounts with a user's profile in a social networking system.
Social networking systems, or social utilities that track and enable connections between users (including people, businesses, and other entities), have become prevalent in recent years. In particular, a social networking system allows users to more efficiently communicate information that is relevant to their friends or other connections in the social network. Social networks typically incorporate a system for maintaining connections among users in the social network and links to content that are likely to be relevant to the users. Social networks also collect and maintain information about the users of the social network. This information may be static, such as geographic location, employer, job type, age, music preferences, interests, and a variety of other attributes, or it may be dynamic, such as tracking a user's actions within the social network. This information can then be used to target information delivery so that information more likely to be of particular interest to a user can be communicated to that user.
While a social networking system may capture a wide variety of information about a user, the information is based on interactions within the social networking system or interactions with online entities that share information with the social networking system. However, social networking system users perform a variety of actions outside of the social networking system or with entities that do not share information with the social networking system. For example, social networking system users purchase goods or services from vendors at physical retail locations or using websites associated with the vendors. However, users are currently unable to easily share information about their actions outside of the social networking system, which limits the information available to the social networking system for determining information about the users.